Fedora: a stream of Hatred, Love and Remorse, flowing amongst the beautiful scenery of a three climates Landscape.
Sardou: the most heart-thrilling, the most moving of French tale-tellers. Fedora: his masterpiece. Observe to what pitch of power he has lifted the factor, inseparable from heart moving fiction, of an atrocious Hatred changing by degrees into all winning love. A Woman—a Princess — with all the refined cerebrality of a Slavish Soul — bestows an ardent love on the man she is betrothed to. And lo, a night He is brought before her adoring eyes wrapped in a funebrious sheet, dying Neither can she obtain from him a word of denonciation, or a last love's regret. She believes him to be a victim, a political victim, too. And this belief chafes into her aristocratic nature the desire of revenge. She finds on the murderer, and wrings from him to be don bit avowal of his crime against the man she loved, and of the love he feels for her. So, murderer and lover, he is twice in her power. Coolly she puts the double blade into him.
And them everything is reversed. Loris Ivanoff did not Kill the man she loved out of political reasons. He punished a women seeker for his honour Ontragen. The discovery bursts out like a lightning. Fedora, suddenly goes into the fatal extremitiès of her Savage breed; she hates now the murdered man who betrayed and mocked her love, she loves the man who avenged her. In her presence is now a man she has denonced, who goes unavoidibly to Death: and this man believes in her love, and puts her higher than every living being.
And this is not still the highest pitch of the great tragedy. There is much more reserved to the onlooker. A new pit of horrible developments open itself through a simple revelation. Loris learns that the mysterious woman who has worked round him the not of the Spy is his beloved one; that she who sends him to Death is Fedora. Here the pitch of emotion rises to the high regions of the soul; the material developments of the human tragedy pass into the kingdom of feelings. Down into the open pit langhs the phantom of Suicide. There is no other way. Quick as the bad thought into the eyes of Loris; Fedora swallows her poison.
Love is master even unto Death, not yet unto Shame. Fate is hero purely human, but works like Necessity in Greek tragedies.
(from the original brochure of the film, Caesar Film, 1916)
Teresa Antolin, 10.07.2009
Production Company: Caesar Film - Roma 1916
Director: Giuseppe De Liguoro (and Gustavo Serena)
Screenplay: from Fedora (1882), Victorien Sardou
Adaptation: Giuseppe Paolo Pacchierotti
Director of Photography: Alberto Giuseppe Carta
Set Design: Alfredo Manzi
Cast: Francesca Bertini (Princess Fedora); Carlo Benetti (Count Loris Ipanov); Gustavo Serena (Count Wladimiro); Alfredo De Antoni (Baron Siriex); Olga Benetti (Countess Olga)
Length: 2042 m.
Format: 35 mm
(from the original brochure of the film, Caesar Film, 1916)
Teresa Antolin, 10.07.2009
